Word: quang
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...document purports to be a translation (from Vietnamese to Russian to English) of a report, dated September 1972, by North Vietnamese General Tran Van Quang. Unearthed last January by researcher Stephen J. Morris in the Communist Party archives in Moscow, the document asserts that Vietnam at that time was holding 1,205 American POWs. Quang said the Americans were in 11 prisons scattered around North Vietnam. The number of prisons had been increased from four to 11, he said, so that the POWs could be dispersed following a failed U.S. raid on the Son Tay prison in November...
...most significant item in the Quang report is the assertion that there were 1,205 American POWs in captivity that September. Six months later, Hanoi released 591 POWs, insisting they were the only prisoners alive at that time. If that was true and if the Quang report is accurate, more than 600 POWs must have died or been killed between the fall of 1972 and April...
...authentic document," says a Pentagon official involved in POW affairs, "but we have a lot of questions about the data in it." Defense Intelligence Agency analysts note a certain informality in the text, suggesting it might actually be a transcription of an oral briefing by General Quang...
That could explain some of the more obvious errors, including inaccurate descriptions of the North Vietnamese military-prison system and some badly garbled American names that do not correspond to the names of any U.S. MIAs. Indeed, a covering letter on the document indicates that Quang, who at the time was commander of the 4th Military Region in central South Vietnam, was reporting to his superiors on the success of his mission. He emphasized his plans for Operation Ba Bo, a program of "extermination" of South Vietnamese officials. In this context, Pentagon and congressional experts say, Quang may have engaged...
...Americans are included, the analysts say, it is not possible to come up with a total of 1,205 American candidates for POW status. Apart from MIAs who the Pentagon is all but certain died in combat, there are only 135 so-called discrepancy cases today. After analyzing the Quang report, Robert Sheetz, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's POW office, wrote in an internal Pentagon memo that the "DIA believes the number 1,205 could be an accurate accounting of total prisoners held" if foreigners working as U.S. agents are included. But, Sheetz added in his memo...